


Just Frame The Halves (And Call Them Brothers)

by bloomindistress



Category: Rust (Video Game)
Genre: Family Dynamic, Found Family, Gen, Introspection, Older Sibling Wilbur Soot, POV TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Post-Apocalypse, SBI Rust, Wilbur Soot and TommyInnit are Siblings, almost, how to tag pls help, literally they found each other, sleepy bois inc - Freeform, this will probably be multi-chapter, tommy's got issues to sort out, well 2/4 of SBI (for now), wilbur is not much help but he's there
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-14 22:20:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28802703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bloomindistress/pseuds/bloomindistress
Summary: Tommy tries out the word brother.Title from "Call Them Brothers" by Regina Spektor
Relationships: Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 13
Kudos: 201





	Just Frame The Halves (And Call Them Brothers)

Tommy wakes up in the basement every morning. 

He isn’t really upset about this. Sure, an actual bed would probably be nicer than a sleeping bag on the floor, but Tommy’s familiar with living in less-than-pleasant places, so he gets used to it pretty quickly. Having a roof over his head is new, though, and Tommy finds himself constantly marveling over the way rain pounds on the windows and roof at night instead of leaking through the top of his tent. He doesn’t tell Wilbur this, but he doesn’t have to, really. He shows how much it means to him by never asking to sleep in the bed for a night, regardless of how much his back aches. 

_(Sometimes he wakes up tucked in between its sheets without knowing how he got there. Wilbur is always already awake, and something in Tommy tells him not to ask.)_

He’s never been woken up by the sunrise. The curtains in the downstairs rooms are almost black-out, courtesy of the three hours he’d spent stitching old sheets together until they weren’t see-through. Even then, Tommy has never been one to wake up from something as stupid as too much light. He used to crash in old malls where the lights never turned off, the fluorescent humming a constant in the background, and in most of his old foster homes the other kids had to sleep with all the lights on. There probably isn’t a place in the world Tommy can’t fall asleep in, regardless of the condition.

So it’s never the small beams of light that shoot through the cracks in the curtains that wake him, nor is it the smell of mildew or the dampness of the ground under the sleeping bag, though that does get uncomfortable sometimes. It’s not the call of the mutated crows from beyond the house either, and the horses the two of them stole a few months back have always been silent creatures. It isn’t raiders, usually, though he has been rudely awakened with a gun to the side of his head once or twice. The noise that causes him to stir is much softer than that, and a whole lot more familiar.

The sound that wakes Tommy almost every morning is soft footsteps from the floor above him, accompanied by a quiet humming as Wilbur gets ready for the day. 

It’s like an alarm clock, almost. Every single day, usually without fail, Wilbur will be awake just as the sun is rising, the sound of creaky shutters being opened and sheets rustling as he makes the bed filling Tommy’s ears like a familiar melody, one that he can never seem to get tired of. At some point he recognizes the tune Wilbur always hums as the first song he taught him to play on guitar, and since then he hasn’t been able to stop himself from humming back.

There’s trust in the air, these mornings. Trust that Tommy will be awake by the time Wilbur finishes his routine, sitting sleepily in his “mind palace” and waiting for the cup of water that his companion will eventually bring. Trust that Wilbur won’t forget to grab the guitar that they still keep in his room, though Tommy plays it far more often than Wilbur has in the last few months. Trust that they’ll both be quiet until the sun breaks fully over the horizon, and that they’ll sit together and watch as the dome is haloed in the reds, yellows, and oranges of sunrise.

Their days are always chaotic. They never really know exactly what they’re going to do unless they planned it out the night before, and even then their plans can change in the blink of an eye. There are no constants in the wasteland, and they’ve both become accustomed to this. Tommy might even admit to liking the spontaneity at times; it helps keep him on his toes, and it works pretty well as a way to push anything but the present out of your vision. These mornings, though, are a routine neither of them dare to break, one that seems almost as sacred as their plans for the dome. It’s something for just the two of them, away from the politics and horrors that fill the world on the other side of the chain-link fence. Something that belongs to them completely.

\----

Tommy tries out the word brother. It feels flimsy on his tongue, like it could dissolve at any moment; he doesn’t think this is Wilbur’s fault. That title in particular has always felt forced, too many memories of almost-siblings and friends from before the apocalypse clinging to it with sticky fingers. He tries not to think about them, Tubbo in particular, but he often finds himself wondering if they’re still out there, clawing through life tooth-and-nail like he is. He can’t tell if he would rather them all be dead then think about them roaming the wasteland.

For reasons entirely Wilbur’s doing, though, he feels the definition he’s given the word shifting the more time they spend together. It jumped from meaning _betrayal_ to _survival_ , moving from _façade_ and _strategy_ to something Tommy can’t really describe. A word that he can’t find synonyms for, one that smashes the carefully constructed vocabulary he has crafted since the apocalypse hit to pieces. It’s a word that feels like mornings, that sounds like the plucking of guitar strings from ever-shaking fingers and the warm hum of the fridge they hooked up to the outside generator. Its meaning is hidden somewhere in the folds of Wilbur’s old coat, the one that fits him perfectly, and in the way their radiation burns seem to match, a reminder that they will never be normal. 

Maybe that’s why he’s considering it. The two of them are so different from what the word was supposed to mean originally, and yet it’s the one that rolls of his tongue the easiest when people ask why they’re traveling together. A lie turned into an insurmountable truth, one that strangers don’t bat an eye at when they’re scamming their way into an unsuspecting household's supplies. 

_Brothers_. Fragile, yes, but it also feels like something slotting into place. The final piece of an eight-month-long puzzle, one he hadn’t really known he was solving. He has a feeling that the end result is a sunrise. Completing it doesn’t feel like an end, though, nor does it feel like a beginning. It feels like waking up to humming and knowing how to sing along without a second thought.

**Author's Note:**

> hope you enjoyed :). i considered posting both 'parts' of this piece as different chapters, but they felt too intertwined to post one by one. kinda like brothers (heh).
> 
> sbi rust has turned my brain into a cesspool of found family and brothers and music motifs, and i definitely want to continue writing about it. i have a rough outline of where i want this to go so stick around hehe.
> 
> if you enjoyed this consider leaving a kudos and a comment! srsly comments mean so so much it's insane. ilu all, stay safe out there.  
> -bloom


End file.
